3. Getting more VIC-20 Games for Power20

There are two ways to get VIC-20 software for use with Power20. You can visit one of the VIC-20 archives on the Internet or copy it from your old collection of 5.25" disks.

Please be aware of the copyright problems attached to VIC-20 games. The fact that the VIC-20 is no longer produced, and hardly any new software is available for it, does not mean that the old commercial software has in general become public domain. Even old software, that is no longer sold, is still intellectual property of its author and protected by copyright laws. Only few authors (such as the great Jeff Minter) have actively decided to release their (once commercial) work into public domain. All others have, up to now, just chosen not to take any action against copyright infringements (but may of course revoke this decision at any time).
In other words, the collection mentioned below consists primarily of pirated software. Use it at your own risk - You have been warned!

A detailed study on emulators and the problems that they pose in relation to
Intellectual Property Rights can be found at http://emulegal.emuunlim.com

3.1 Games on CD-ROM

While there are lots of CD-ROMs for almost every other 8-bit machine there are currently no CD-ROMs dedicated to the VIC-20 that I know of.

3.2 Games on the Internet

If you are looking for VIC-20 software on the internet, you might want to look at the following sites:

3.2.1 Downloading and Unpacking Hints

Here are some hints, that will seem trivial to experienced internet users and are meant to help newbies avoid the most frequent errors.

VIC-20 games are always stored in binary, never in text (ASCII) files. If you are using a FTP program for downloading make sure it is switched to binary mode. If you are using a webbrowser such as Safari, Firefox, iCab or Opera press the option key when clicking on the link of a game. Otherwise there is a good chance that you will end up with a file that looks fine at first glance but is internally corrupted and unusable.

Most games for the VIC-20 are stored as plain *.PRG files without any compression, as the files tend to be very small (a few KByte) and compression does not really pay off for such tiny files. They can be used without any additional preparation.
On the other hand, you might find some compressed files on the net. Some sites offer games in a compressed format, that saves disk space and network bandwidth. Common file extensions for compressed files are: ZIP, GZ, LHA and SIT. Power20 can use ZIP, GZ and LHA files directly - there is no need to waste hard disk space by decompressing them before use. SIT files need to be expanded before they can be used with Power20.

The easiest way to expand a compressed file is to drag and drop it on StuffIt Expander with Expansion Enhancer. Both StuffIt Expander and Dropstuff with Expansion Enhancers are available at your local info-mac archive or from Smith Micro Software at http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/stuffitexpander/index.html.
StuffIt Expander is freeware, Dropstuff with Expansion Enhancer is shareware and together they expand all the important file formats.

Some sites also offer SFX files. These are Self Extracting LHArchives, that need to be unpacked on an (emulated) C64 (such as Power64 by Roland Lieger) or C128 but unfortunately not a VIC-20. The easiest way to do this probably is to mount the folder containing the SFX file as drive #9 and place a new disk image (or a disk image with sufficient free space) in drive #8. Now LOAD and RUN the SFX file, just like any other C64 program. It will ask for a drive and a device number. Answer '0' and '8' respectively and stand by as the archive is unpacked onto the floppy. When expansion is completed, you have the playable game on the disk, that can now be used like any other D64 file. The SFX file is then no longer needed.
Note that the C64 is a slow computer (in comparison to your Mac). Decompression might take quite a while. If you are using Power64 then you might want to increase the CPU speed using Options/Turbo Boost.

If the expansion tool complained about a bad file structure, checksum errors or similar problems, the most likely cause is that you made an error in downloading. Remember: All VIC-20 games (compressed or not) are stored in binary files! When in doubt use an specialized FTP tool for downloading. Don't (ab-)use your webbrowser for FTP sessions.

Now you hopefully successfully managed to expand the downloaded games. Still the files look dull on your Macintosh desktop and double-clicking on them does not start Power20. Please remember that there are computer systems other than the Macintosh out there. They have no idea of the Type/Creator system that the MacOS uses to keep files linked to icons and applications. Thus such information is not stored in the compressed file and can therefore not be retrieved when it is expanded.
Still Power20 is able to use such files, if you manually start Power20 and use the Device menu to attach a D64, T64 etc. to an appropriate drive. If a file does not have one of the characteristic extensions, it is most likely a CBM program file and you should mount its folder as a hard disk. After a file has been successfully loaded Power20 will adjust the Type/Creator for this file, so that it can be opened Mac style by double-clicking.

There is another VIC-20 Emulator for the Macintosh. Unfortunately the current version 0.6 is far from perfect. The emulation is slow and imprecise. Many games do not work. Still you might want to look at Matthew Browne's VIC 20 Emulator at:

3.4 Using original 1541 Floppy disks

If you have your own collection of documents and games that you wrote yourself, and that are not publicly available you can copy these from 5.25" disk to your Mac. Unfortunately this is not a straight forward job. Still there are several options:

Get a DOS PC, a 1541 disk drive, a cable to hook the 1541 to the printer port of the PC and Star Commander. The cable is a simple 5 wire affair that anyone with a soldering iron can produce for less than $20. Star Commander is a shareware program written by Joe Forster, that lets you copy files and disk images between the 1541 and the PC very easily. The Star Commander manual also explains how the cable is to be built. Once you have the files on the PC you can easily transfer them to your Mac using 3.5" disks. The file formats are the same. Star Commander is available at: http://sta.c64.org

There are 3.5" disk drives available that can be connected to the C64, and produce Mac compatible disks. Unfortunately I have no such drive nor do I have any experience with this method. I would welcome any reports on this topic.

Use the "Big Blue Reader" a commercial package, from SOGWAP software, that runs on either a 64 or a 128, will read and write MS-DOS format 3.5" (with a 1581) and 5.25" (with a 1571) disks. Note that it does not support 1541 disk drives.

3.5 Using original cassette tapes

If you have a collection of private files on (audio) cassette tapes, you can attempt to convert them for use on your Mac. This is however a rather tricky process, that starts out by converting the tapes to uncompressed WAV files (do NOT attempt to convert them to MP3 (or similar compressed formats) since the compression scemes are optimised for the human ear (and not for computer 'listeners') and will discard information that is essential for data recovery). These files can than be converted to TAP and/or T64 using a Windows PC (unfortunatly not a Mac) and one of the following tools: